Gideon the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #1)

by Tamsyn Muir

“I cannot in good conscience, until I know the fate of Protesilaus the Seventh. Anyone here could be guilty. Brother Asht. Here.” The chain mail–kirtled boy tossed the ring to his cavalier, who caught it out of the air and fished his own heavy key ring out of his pocket. Gideon noticed that their ring held a facility key and one other, in black wrought iron with curlicues. Colum the Eighth locked the two rings together with a very final click. “I’ll keep these until such a time as she wants them. Judging by our conversation, that may well be never.” This was received with a brief silence. “You callous bastard,” shouted Naberius, “you just went and heavied a nearly dead girl for her keys.”

This guy should be a suspect literdally stole a guys keys and hdr calivier is missing

“Is that a challenge to me, then, Captain?” he said sorrowfully. “You’ll keep.” The Second adept thrust her chin toward Palamedes, who had been sitting with fingers steepled beneath his jaw, staring through the walls as though discord was so intensely distasteful that he could only distance himself from it. “Warden, the Sixth is the Emperor’s Reason. I asked you earlier, and I’m telling you now: hand over what keys you’ve won for my safekeeping.” The Sixth, the Emperor’s Reason, blinked. “With all respect,” he said, “piss off.” “Let the record state that I was forced into a challenge,” said Lieutenant Dyas, and she peeled off one white glove. She threw it down on the table, looking Palamedes dead in the eye. “We duel. I name the time, you name the place. The time is now.” “Duel the Sixth?” squawked Jeannemary. “That’s not fair!”

Naberius’s hand was hesitating hard on the hilt. He had not sprung into action as proposed, nor had he flanked the commanding twin. He was staring at her pale shadow, knuckles white, hand still, with a resentment very near hate. Corona’s smile flickered. “Babs?”

Kinda feel bad for the guy

“I have no idea what any of that means,” said Palamedes. Gideon drew forward to them, leaning in to hear Corona saying in an urgent whisper: “Warden—that means she can hit your cavalier anywhere below the neck, and it ends only when you give in. She’s being an absolute cad, and I’m not even slightly sorry for pantsing her when we were eight.”

Me neither

“As though anyone was even offering,” snapped Ianthe. “If you have all finished,” said Silas Octakiseron with his deep, tyrannically servile politeness, “Brother Asht and I are going to go and look for Protesilaus the Seventh. He is, after all, still missing.”

Oh yeah i forget about him

“I have no interest in talking to you anymore,” said Silas. “The Warden of the Sixth House is an unfinished inbred who passed an examination. Your companion is a mad dog, and I doubt her legal claim to the title of cavalier primary. I would not even bother to thrash her. Enjoy the patronage of the shadow cult, while it lasts; I am sorry that it came to this. Brother Asht, we leave.”

How fucking rude

“A challenge taken purely as a necromantic exercise,” said Harrow calmly, “suggests many things, but reveals none. Only the underlying theorem can lay bare the mystery.” “And the theorems are behind the locked doors,” Isaac said meditatively, “aren’t they? You need the keys for the doors, or you’re screwed.”

“Well, you’ve come to the right conclusion. Behind the doors there are studies, and all eight—there’s eight, obviously, one per House—contain notes on the relevant theorem. All eight theorems presumably add up to some kind of, ah…” “Megatheorem,” supplied Isaac, who, after all, was like thirteen. “Megatheorem,” he agreed. “The key to the secrets of Lyctorhood.” Jeannemary Chatur’s brain had obviously ground forward, struggling past confusion and puberty hormones to some slowly formed conclusion. “Wait. Go back, Sixth House,” she demanded. “What did you mean by one more key?” Palamedes drummed his fingers on the table. “Well. Forgive me the explanation, Ninth, I know you’ve been keeping track of the keys—” (Ha! Ha! Ha! thought Gideon. She hadn’t.) “—but I couldn’t work out how many keys Lady Septimus had. I knew she had at least one, but when Octakiseron convinced her to hand them over”—he freighted convinced with such heavy scorn it ought to have fallen through the floor—“he accidentally showed us her card. She had two. That means there’s one left that I haven’t accounted for, and we’ve got to account for it.” “We need to find the Seventh cav,” added Camilla. He nodded. “Yes, and we also have to work out who the hell’s in the incinerator. Ianthe Tridentarius was right—a sentence I don’t like saying—in that there’s more than one person in there.”

Isaac said: “I have a duty to find out who killed Magnus and Abigail, first and foremost.” “You’re right, Baron Tettares,” said Palamedes warmly, “but trust me, I think answering those three questions will help us quite considerably in solving that mystery. Ninth, Protesilaus was still down in the facility as of last night.” Harrow looked at him blankly. “How do you know?” “We saw him go in,” said the Fourth as one. And Isaac added: “After we eavesdropped on you and the Sixth.” “Good for you. But it makes sense, too. Lady Septimus said He didn’t come back, and when we saw her key ring just now it only had challenge keys—no hatch key. She must have given that to him so he could access the facility by himself—although why, I still don’t know. I bet you the whole of my library’s physical sciences section that he’s still down there. It would be impossible for someone to bring him up without being seen.” “Then we need to go down and look,” said Jeannemary, visibly impatient at the lack of action. “Let’s go!” “Don’t be so Fourth,” said Palamedes. “We should split up. We’re fighting a battle on two fronts here. Frankly—I would not leave Lady Septimus unguarded, sans cavalier, with just the First House to guard her.” Harrowhark said, “Her keys are gone. What’s the attraction now?” Camilla said, “Vulnerability.” “Yes. It can’t just be a game of keys, Nonagesimus. Why did Magnus Quinn and Abigail Pent die, when they had nothing on them but a facility key and their own good selves? W...

Her necromancer said gruffly: “Fine. But we’ll watch over the Seventh House. I’m not going down the ladder with your invalid cavalier.” Palamedes said, “Fine. Perhaps that’s better use of our talents, anyway. Fourth, are you all right to go with Gideon the Ninth? I realise I am presupposing that our motives all align—but all I can assure you is that they really do. Search the facility, and if you find him—or come up short—come back to us, and we’ll move from there. Get in and get out.” The bleary necromantic teen looked to his bleary cavalier. Jeannemary said immediately, “We’ll go with the Ninth. She’s all right. The stories about the Ninth House seem probably bullshit, anyway.”

Gideon said, “Did you know that if you put the first three letters of your last name with the first three letters of your first name, you get ‘Sex Pal’?” The dreadful teens both stared with eyes so wide you could have marched skeletons straight through them. “You—do you talk?” said Isaac. “You’ll wish she didn’t,” said Camilla.

She still didn’t understand what she was meant to do or think or say: what duty really meant, between a cavalier and a necromancer, between a necromancer and a cavalier.

Neither wanted to be coaxed out. Their puff had seemed to leave them. They clustered close together, grave-faced and tense. Isaac raised a hand and faint, ghostlike flames appeared at his fingertips—bluish-greenish, giving off a sickly little light that did not do much to illuminate what was going on around them.

Oh all people why did those two go? I thought they were going to guard the lady?

“Bodies were brought into here—a long time ago. A lot of bone matter. The First feels like a graveyard all over, but this is worse. I’m not faking.” “I believe you,” said Gideon. “Some of the stuff I’ve seen down here would ruin your eyelids. I don’t know what the hell they were researching, but I don’t like it. Only bright side is that it’s all pretty self-contained.”

One of the motion-sensor lights struggled back on behind them, a short way down the passage. A ceiling panel threw the metal siding into sharp white relief. It was daubed with words that had not been there a few seconds before, written in blood so fresh and red that there were little drips: DEATH TO THE FOURTH HOUSE

Holy shit

Isaac did not stop and he did not run. It was one of the bravest and stupidest things Gideon had ever fucking seen. The construct teetered, getting its footing, cocking its great head as though in contemplation. The long straight spars of teeth hovered above the necromancer, bobbing and warping occasionally as though about to be sucked into his fiery gyre. Then at least fifty of them speared him through. Blue fire and blood sprayed the room. Gideon sheathed her sword, set her shoulders, put one arm up above her eyes, and charged through the field like a rocket. It was like running through a landslide. A thousand fragments of bone ripped her robes to shreds and tore at every inch of exposed skin. She didn’t pay them any mind, but crashed into Jeannemary Chatur like the vengeance of the Emperor. Jeannemary had no intention of stopping: she was tearing into her unbeatable foe as though running away had never been in question. She barely seemed to notice that Gideon had grabbed her, her limbs thrashing, her throat one long howl that Gideon only translated later: Fidelity! Fidelity! Fidelity! How she scrambled through that hallway, the other girl clutched to her bosom, long tendrils of bone snaking after them from the central room, she did not know. The fact that she shinnied up the ladder with Jeannemary attached, kicking and screaming, was even more unlikely. She tossed the cavalier down—she would have been surprised if the girl had even felt it—slammed the hatch lid, and tur...

Is isaac dead??

Jeannemary was still lying prone in the old bed, arms and legs now flung wide, as if she had kicked off the blankets and sheets in a bad dream: this would have been fine, except for the huge shafts of bone spearing each shoulder to the mattress. Two more through the thighs. One straight through the very centre of her ribs. These spears of bone met Jeannemary’s body with haloes of red, splotching through her clothes, seeping into the bedspread. “No,” said Gideon meditatively, “no, no, no, no, no.” Jeannemary’s eyes were very slightly open. There was blood spattered in her curls, and there was blood spattered over the headboard. Gideon’s gaze followed the splatter upward. Written on the wall, in silky wet red, was: SWEET DREAMS

Awwwww fuck

SIDE BY SIDE, THE Fourth teens were laid to an uneasy sleep in the morgue, right next to the adults who had failed so terminally to look after them. Somebody had (how? It was a mystery) taken the cooling body from Gideon’s arms (who had plucked those spears from those terrible holes and carried Jeannemary back?) and a lot of people had spoken a lot of words to her, none of which had pierced her short-term memory. Teacher was there, in her mind’s eye, praying over the broken sieve of Isaac Tettares; and Harrowhark was in there somewhere too, and Palamedes, tweezering a big fragment of something out of the cooling corpse of Jeannemary the Fourth. These images were as jumbled-up and lacking in context as a dream.

“I can’t bear it,” said Gideon honestly. “It’s just such crap.” “Life is a tragedy,” said Dulcinea. “Left behind by those who pass away, not able to change anything at all. It’s the total lack of control … Once somebody dies, their spirit’s free forever, even if we snatch at it or try to stopper it or use the energy it creates. Oh, I know sometimes they come back … or we can call them, in the manner of the Fifth … but even that exception to the rule shows their mastery of us. They only come when we beg. Once someone dies, we can’t grasp at them anymore, thank God!—except for one person, and he’s very far from here, I think. Gideon, don’t be sorry for the dead. I think death must be an absolute triumph.”

“They are dead, then,” his uncle said, by way of hello. The only thing that saved Gideon from howling like an animal was the relief that, finally, she would get the chance to shove one of Octakiseron’s feet so deep into his ass he’d be gargling with his calcaneus.

“What did you call me?” “Thrall,” said Silas. “Serf. Servant.” “I don’t want a bunch of synonyms, you smarmy cloud-looking motherfucker,” said Gideon. “You said Gideon Nav.”

Hahahaha get him girl

The necromancer’s voice drifted down after her: “Will you come and listen to what I have to say? Be decisive.” “Eat me, milk man,” said Gideon, and staggered around the corner. She heard Colum’s “Means yes, probably,” but not the murmured reply.

“You are still convinced by your … megatheorem idea, then.” “Yes. Aren’t you?” “No. It’s sensational.” “But not out of the question. Look. The tasks and challenges—the theories underpinning them—they’re really not that disparate. Neural amalgamation. Transferral of energy. As we saw in the entropy field challenge, continuous siphoning. The magical theory’s astonishing. Nobody has pushed necromantic power this far: it’s unsustainable. If the intent is to show off the sheer breadth of Lyctoral power—well, they did. I’ve seen the winnowing test, and if the self-replicating bone golem had been the only thing in it I would still be kept up at night. I don’t know how the hell they did it.” “I do,” said Harrow, “and if my calculations are right I can replicate it. But all this is more than unsustainable, Sextus. The things they’ve shown us would be powerful—would bespeak impossible depth of necromantic ability—if they were replicable. These experiments all demand a continuous flow of thanergy. They’ve hidden that source somewhere in the facility, and that’s the true prize.” “Ah. Your secret door theory. Very Ninth.” She bristled. “It’s a simple understanding of area and space. Including the facility, we’ve got access to maybe thirty percent of this tower. That’s what’s called hard evidence, Warden. Your megatheorem is based on supposition and your so-called ‘instinct.’” “Thanks! Anyway, I don’t like how many of these spells are about sheer control,” said Palamedes. “Don’t be feeb...

I believe they’re parts of an overarching whole; like the whiteboard in the facility, remember? It is finished. You believe they’re giving us clues—prompts—toward some deeper occult understanding that’s hidden elsewhere, this power source idea. I see puzzle pieces; you see direction signs. Now, maybe you’re right and we’re meant to follow the crumbs to some master treasure. But if I’m right—if Lyctorhood is nothing more or less than the synthesis of eight individual theorems…”

“Not an idiot, Reverend Daughter. A Lyctoral lock—the one that matches the Sixth House key. The grey key. Which Silas Octakiseron currently holds. Hence: picking.” “That’s impossible. How?” “You can’t know until we do it. If it works, it gets you every single note on every theorem I’ve read, in return for yours, your cooperation, and the map. Are you in?” There was a pregnant pause. As everyone had already known beforehand, Gideon’s necromancer was forced to admit that she was in. She

“Ask me how I am and I’ll scream,” she said. “How are you,” said Camilla, who was a pill. “I see you calling my bluff and I resent it,” said Gideon. “So, hey. What do you really use when you’re not pretending the rapier’s your main wield? Two short blades of equal length, or one blade and one baton?”

“This,” she said calmly, “is regenerating ash.” “Perpetual bone, which accounts for it being undateable—” “Same stuff as the transferral construct.” “In which case—” “Whoever put this in place would need to have a comparable level of skill to whoever made the construct,” said Harrow. “Getting it out again would require more power than most bone specialists hold—in aggregate.”

“Sextus,” she said blandly, “I am embarrassed for you that you can’t.”

“The big one,” said Harrow, without hesitation. Gideon was pretty sure both twins were the same size, and was surprised to discover that even the anatomist’s gaze of Harrowhark Nonagesimus was not immune to the radiance coming off Princess Corona. “They’re both only middling necromancers, but the big one is the dominant. She says I; the sister says we.” “Honestly a good point. Still not sure. Meet me tomorrow night and we’ll start the theorem exchange, Ninth. I’ve got to think.” “The missing key,” said Harrow. “The missing key.”

“No,” said Gideon. “Nah. Nope. Denied. That’s not me.” “You’re not her bodyguard.” “I never pledged to be yours either,” said Gideon. “Not really.” “Yes, you did,” snapped Harrowhark. “You agreed to act as my cavalier primary. You agreed to devote yourself to the duties of a cavalier. Your misunderstanding of what that entailed does not make you any less beholden to what your duty actually is—” “I promised to fight for you. You promised me my freedom. There’s a hell of a good chance that I’m not going to get it, and I know it. We’re all dying here! Something’s after us! The only thing I can do is try to keep as many of us as I can alive for as long as I can, and hope that we work something

“Harrow, I hate you,” said Gideon. “I never stopped hating you. I will always hate you, and you will always hate me. Don’t forget that. It’s not like I ever can.”

You may hate me all you wish; I still don’t even remember about you half the time.” She turned away from Gideon. She did not walk away, but stood there for a moment in the simple arrogance of showing the other girl her back

How rude

“Stand in front of a window now and I’ll do the hard part,” said Gideon. “Oh, take a nap,” snapped Harrowhark. Gideon very nearly did lay hands on her then, and probably should have.

“When I release you from my service, Nav,” her necromancer said, “you will know about it.” And she walked away. Gideon decided, then and there, her betrayal.

Wait whatttt

“Ghosts?” “Revenants, to be explicit,” said Silas. “Those rare and determined spirits who search out the living before they pass, unbidden, by clinging to scraps of their former lives. I was surprised that a woman like Glaurica made the transition. She did not last long.” Her vertebrae did not turn to ice, but it would’ve been a lie to say they didn’t cool down considerably. “Glaurica’s dead?” Silas took an infuriatingly long drink of water. The pallid column of his throat moved. “They died on the way back to their home planet,” he said, wiping his mouth. “Their shuttle exploded. Curious, considering it was a perfectly good Cohort shuttle with an experienced pilot. This was the shuttle you had intended to commandeer, was it not?”

“What do you want, a census?” “I want you to think about why you and Harrowhark Nonagesimus now represent an entire generation,” he said, and he leant forward onto his elbows. His eyes were very intense. His nephew was still braiding his hair, which only somewhat lessened the effect. “I want you to think about the deaths of two hundred children, when you and she alone lived.” “Okay, look, this is wacky,” said Gideon. “You’ve picked on exactly the wrong thing to slam Harrow with. If you want to talk about how she’s a corrupt tyrant, I’m all ears. But I know about the flu. She wasn’t even born yet. I was, what, one year old, so I didn’t do it. There was vent bacteria in the creche and the schoolroom hall, and it took out all the kids and one of the teachers before they found out what it was.” This had made perfect sense to her, always: not only were the children of the Ninth unusually sickly and decrepit anyway—the Ninth House only seemed to truck with the pallid, defective, and upset—but among so much malign decay nobody would have noticed a ventilation problem until it was far too late. She

With numb fingers, Gideon removed the severed head of Protesilaus the Seventh.

FUCK OFF FUCK OFF

Palamedes took off his glasses. He finally stopped molesting the head, and he pushed himself up and away from the desk; he sat down heavily on the mattress next to Gideon, skinny knees tucked up into his chest. “Okay. Why?” he asked simply. “Because I killed her parents,” said Gideon. He did not say anything. He just waited, and in the space of that waiting, she talked. And she told him the beginning stuff—how she was born, how she grew up, and how she came to be the primary cavalier of the Ninth House—and she told him the secret she had kept for seven long and awful years.

What????

The difference was that although most people ignored small Gideon Nav the way you would a turd that had sprouted legs,

By the time Harrow was ten years old, she had glutted herself on secrets. She had grown bored of ancient tomes, bored of the bones she had been raising since before she’d finished growing her first set of teeth, and bored of making Gideon run gauntlets of skeletons. At last she set her gaze on the one thing truly forbidden to her: Harrow became obsessed with the Locked Door. There was no key to the Locked Door. Maybe there had never been a key to the Locked Door. It simply didn’t open. What lay beyond would kill the trespasser before they’d cracked it wide enough to go through anyway, and what lay beyond that—long before ever getting to the tomb—would make them wish they were dead long before their final breath. The

So she told them. And they listened. They had not said a word, either in praise or in censure, but they had listened. They had called for Harrow. And they had made Gideon leave. She waited outside the great dark doors of their room for a very long time, because they hadn’t told her to go away, just go out of the room, and because she was a shitty trash child she wanted to relish the one chance she had of hearing Harrowhark raked over the coals. But she waited a whole hour and never heard a damn thing, let alone Harrow’s screams as she was confined to oss duty until she turned thirty. And then Gideon couldn’t wait anymore. She pushed open the door and she walked in—and found Pelleamena and Priamhark hanging from the rafters, purple and dead. Mortus the Ninth, their huge and tragic cavalier, swung beside them from a rafter groaning with his bulk. And she walked in on Harrowhark, holding lengths of unused rope among the chairs her parents had kicked aside, with eyes like coals that had burnt away.

“Harrow wants to become a Lyctor,” she said. “She would do anything to become a Lyctor. She’d easily have killed Dulcinea’s cavalier if she thought it would help her become a Lyctor. Nothing else matters to her. I know that now. In the last couple days, I sometimes thought—” Gideon did not finish that sentence, which would have been “that she had stopped making it her top priority.”

“Yes,” said Palamedes. “If you hadn’t told Harrow’s parents about the door, they would not have made the decision to end their lives. You inarguably caused it. But cause by itself is an empty concept.

The choice to get up in the morning—the choice to have a hot breakfast or a cold one—the choice to do something thirty seconds faster, or thirty seconds slower—those choices cause all sorts of things to happen. That doesn’t make you responsible. Here’s a confession for you: I killed Magnus and Abigail.”

wait back up? What??

She rubbed at the bridge of her nose. “Octakiseron said you guys loved to mess with what words mean.” “The Eighth House thinks there’s right and there’s wrong,” said Palamedes wearily, “and by a series of happy coincidences they always end up being right. Look, Nav. You ratted out your childhood nemesis to get her in trouble. You didn’t kill her parents, and she shouldn’t hate you like you did, and you shouldn’t hate you like you did.”

Gideon did not look at her, and Harrow did not look at Gideon. Gideon very slowly put her hand on her sword, but for nothing. Harrow was looking at Palamedes. She expected pretty much anything, but she didn’t expect him to say— “Nonagesimus—why didn’t you tell me?” “I didn’t trust you,” she said simply. “My original theory was that you’d done it. Septimus wasn’t capable on her own, and it didn’t seem far-fetched that you were working in concert.” “Will you believe me when I say we aren’t?” “Yes,” she said, “because if you were that good you would have killed my cavalier already. I hadn’t even intended to hurt him, Sextus, the head fell off the moment I pushed.” What? “Then we go,” said Palamedes. “We get everyone. We talk to her. I won’t have any more conversations in the dark, or doubting of my intentions.” Gideon said helplessly, “Someone enlighten me, I am just a poor cavalier,” but nobody paid her the slightest damn bit of attention even though she had her hand very forbiddingly on her sword. Harrow was ignoring her entirely in favour of Palamedes, and she was saying: “I wasn’t sure you’d be willing to go that far, even for the truth.” Palamedes looked at her with an expression as grey and airless as the ocean outside the window. “Then you do not know me, Harrowhark.”

“Lady Septimus, Duchess of Rhodes,” he said, very formally, “I put to you before everyone here—that this man was dead before you arrived, by shuttle, at the First House, and appeared alive only through deep flesh magic.”

“A dying woman is the perfect necromancer,” said Ianthe. “I wish I could get rid of that idea. Maybe for the final ten minutes,” said Palamedes. “The technical fact that dying enhances your necromancy is vitiated considerably by the fact that you can’t make any use of it. You might have access to a very personal source of thanergy, but considering your organs are shutting down—” “It’s not possible,” insisted Harrow, words hard and clipped in her mouth. “You seem to know a lot about it. Well, I put it to you: Would it be possible for all the heads of the Seventh House,” said Dulcinea calmly, “adepts of the perfect death—a Seventh House mystic secret, one that’s been ours forever—working all in concert?” “Perhaps initially, but—” “King Undying,” said Silas, primly disgusted. “It was a conspiracy.” “Oh, sit on it,” said Dulcinea. “I know all about you and your house, Master Silas Octakiseron … the Emperor himself never bothered to speak out against beguiling corpsehood, but he did say that siphoning was the most dangerous thing any House had ever thought up, and ought only to be done with the siphoner in cuffs.” “That does not mitigate the penalty for performing a necromantic act of transgression—” “I’ve no interest in meting out the justice of the tome,” said Captain Deuteros, gruffly. “I know that’s the Eighth House’s prerogative. But at the same time, Master Octakiseron, we cannot afford this right now.” “A woman who would be party to this kind of magic,” said Silas, “migh...

“Today isn’t the day when we start to use one another’s bodies. Or tomorrow, or ever. We’re not barbarians.” “Sheer prevarication,” remarked her sister to nobody in particular. “Some people will do anything to get … a head.”

That was a good one

Gideon expected him to add her to the already dead list. She would decide to go out with an audience, with her hair done, and with her miserable secrets revealed. Now she knew that Dulcinea had always been alone, carrying on an even greater farce than Gideon’s, knowing the impossibility of the odds. But the dying necromancer sucked in a sudden, rattling, popped-balloon breath, her whole body surging in spasm. Gideon’s heart started up again. Before she could move, Palamedes was there, and with terrible tenderness—as though they were alone in the room and the world alike—he kissed the back of Dulcinea’s hand.